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Time Warp: Molten Salt Reactor Experiment—Alvin Weinberg’s magnum opus | ORNL

During the 1968 event, Weinberg dubbed MSRE the “Mighty Smooth Running Experiment.” As he addressed a gathered crowd, he motioned to nearby barrels containing processed salt carrier and spent fuel.  The barrels had no radiological protection and needed none.

The reactor went on to log 11,515 hours of critical operation during its brief run.  It was shut down ceremoniously in 1969, having achieved all that was asked of it. The graphite bars that lined the reactor core as its moderator showed little to no damage, whether from heat, radiation or chemical corrosion.

The molten salt program ended in 1973, with the Atomic Energy Commission deciding to focus on other designs. Both government and industry are now reevaluating molten salt technology as an answer to the global energy challenge. It’s a conversation built on what Weinberg considered one of ORNL’s greatest technical achievements.

And we dropped the ball. If you believe in abundance, at least of energy, instead of the upcoming era of expensive and scarce energy, molton salt reactors will pay a large part.

If you believe in this….

The you should be supporting this: China Details Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor Program

Xu detailed a multi-stage plan to build demonstration reactors in the next five years and deploy them commercially beginning around 2030. The institute plans to build a 10-megawatt prototype reactor, using solid fuel, by 2020, along with a two-megawatt liquid-fuel machine that will demonstrate the thorium-uranium fuel cycle. (Thorium, which is not fissile, is converted inside a reactor into a fissile isotope of uranium that produces energy and sustains the nuclear reaction.)

In all, there are 700 nuclear engineers working on the molten-salt reactor at SINAP, Xu said, a number that dwarfs other advanced-reactor research programs around the world. The team has a preliminary design for a 10-megawatt thorium-based molten-salt reactor, and has mastered some of the technical challenges involved in building and running such reactors, such as the preparation of high-purity molten salts and the control of tritium, a dangerous isotope of hydrogen that can be used in the making of nuclear weapons. Limiting the production of tritium is a key research goal for the development of molten-salt reactors.

While most of the audience at Oak Ridge was familiar with the outlines of the Chinese program, the level of sophistication and the progress to date were startling to many listeners.

“It’s very surprising how far they’ve come in four years,” said John Kutsch, the vice president for business development at Terrestrial Energy, which is developing its own version of a molten-salt reactor. “That shows you what throwing hundreds of researchers at a project will do to speed progress.”

This technology should be rapidly developed. It’s a tragedy the US is not leading the way in a technology they initially developed in the 1950’s.